From one piece Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) 20 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I have a hard time picturing entertainment that doesn't have humans at the heart of it. So that that's humans in the creation of the storytelling, which I think is a scarce and valuable skill.
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Which means we need to have a flexibility in the tools that we provide and the types of partnerships we have, and to really have a creator enablement view rather than a prescriptive that we only do this one way.
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korrents.com
The AI shock to engineering is an acceleration of a change that has been running for decades, not a break from it.Their words
It feels like it's a it's an acceleration of how much engineering has changed. But if you looked over the last 10 years or 20 years you would say the same thing.
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Their words
So looking at some of the code that some of these models or agents are writing they're very hard to follow. It's like I know I'm getting better performance from this but I have no idea why and if this thing breaks I'm going to have no idea how to fix it.
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I think there's a difference between being able to write lines of code in a particular language like Python or C++ and understanding how code, computer systems, products work. And I don't think the latter is going away.
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So, even in a world of AI where some things are easier, we were talking earlier about mindset, AI fluency. From my experience, younger folks are more open-minded. They tend to be more native in some of these new ways of working.
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It does feel like we have to be more more explicit about the types of people and talent that tend to thrive at Netflix versus other companies like some of the frontier labs.
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Or the perfect way to go through feedback and leveling and compensation. But every time we saw that and we added more process, we spent more time without getting better outcomes.
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Well, the talent density is the non-negotiable. Like you have to start with that. If you don't have that, you can't get to a place where you have confidence in decision-making at all levels of the organization, allowing people to take risks and innovate quickly.
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It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.
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korrents.com
Candidates should be allowed to use AI tools in a coding interview, because that is what the work now requires.Their words
And even for things like coding interviews, allowing candidates, of course, to use AI tools because that's going to be part of what the work requires now.
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So, the most useful thing is not to make it level specific or role specific, but to encourage everyone towards the expectation on AI fluency, which doesn't mean use it as a tech for the sake of tech. It's tech where it's useful, to have good judgment about that, and to have the mindset to be open-minded to explore and try new things.
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But as a general rule, uh compared to 5 or 10 years ago, I I would believe we have fewer specialists and more people who are generalists or adaptable in multiple directions.
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korrents.com
Deep design expertise does not get squeezed out just because code and analysis got faster.Their words
But I think it would be a mistake to say design and deep design expertise and thinking gets squeezed out just because we can write code faster. We can do data analysis faster.
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I get really nervous about having different design languages or different types of user interactions and shipping Frankensteins, basically. So, designers need to then be the people we're hiring again for design systems thinking.
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In a world of AI with agents operating across multiple systems, wanting source of truth data, the importance of having preferred paved paths that get the most of the benefits and produce some guardrails so we can make sure we're doing good work, common infrastructure, common paved paths, solving problems once with a core set of capabilities becomes more important.
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So, we are hiring more people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need in a world with AI.
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korrents.com
Craft excellence within each discipline is not going away, however much AI blurs the work across functional lines.Their words
I still see a craft excellence that's really important in the disciplines that I don't think is going away anytime soon. Even if there's fluidity or blurring of the work across the functional lines.
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korrents.com
That AI lets anyone prototype does not mean everyone should be shipping code to production.Their words
Do I believe that means anyone should be shipping code to production? That everyone should actually be doing everything? Probably not. But I think that it's good for people to be exploring what's possible.
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Their words
I think anytime a new technology comes along, especially one that's as transformative as GenAI, you go through a storming phase before you go through the forming phase of things. And I think we are in the middle of that right now.